


Queen Whore

by SaltAndSmoke



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: A Dance with Dragons, ADWD, ASoIaF, Astapor, Blood, Books, Daenerys Targaryen - Freeform, Death, Drabble, House Targaryen, One Shot, Violence, War, a song of ice and fire - Freeform, plaque, queen whore - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-06
Updated: 2016-06-06
Packaged: 2018-07-12 18:11:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7117054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SaltAndSmoke/pseuds/SaltAndSmoke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Astapor has fallen; the Yunkai'i have arrived and the Silver Queen has foresaken the red brick city. And when a city falls, the ones who ruled it must fall with it...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Queen Whore

**Author's Note:**

> This is a one shot I wrote at a request on Tumblr. Someone requested me to write something based on the first full sentence on page 441 in the book I was currently reading, and as it happened, I was reading A Dance With Dragons.   
> The sentence was: “Queen Whore died fighting them with a curse upon her lips” (Gerorge R.R. Martin, A Dance With Dragons, p.441)  
> This short story describes Queen Whore's last hour before her death...have fun.

She heared the screams even through the thick red brick walls of her palace. They were loud, piercing the air, shrieks half man and half animal but all full of pain.   
 _Death,_ was all they said.

_They have come.  
_

Queen Whore wasn’t surprised at all. She had known all along that this was going to happen. All those fools outside the gates, those who were dying screaming out there had been so full of hope. 

_Daenerys hasn’t abandoned us,_ they’d said, _the Silver Queen is on her way to save us this very moment, she’ll be here and she will help us just you see!_

She had known the truth though. Her Radiance had forsaken them, had left them and was sitting in Meereen _this very moment,_ nibbling on figs and giving less than a dragon’s fart about Astapor or its people within. Else, she’d have come already, answering Cleon’s pleas to marry him. 

Astapor’s people were dead now, or dying.  
 _My people,_ Queen Whore thought with a trace of amusement. They’d never accepted her as their Queen and she was aware of that. _Queen_ she had styled herself, but _Whore_ was what they’d called her for she’d been a Whore before she became a queen. Even when she had taken up the Butcher King’s cleaver and taken her place next to her King Cutthroat they had still been defying her.  

And now they were all going to die. 

The self-styled Queen of Astapor smoothed her robes with her hands, fastened a swordbelt around her waist and bound her hair back. If she had to die, it would not be without a fight. She had no intention on sitting in this stolen palace, waiting for some sellsword of the Free Companies to find, rape and kill her. 

On her way to the Castle’s gates, she did not encounter anyone. The halls and yards were empty, deserted. They’d been like that for weeks now, the maids and guards and stewarts taken by the bloody flux or fled or gone to guard Astapor’s walls. 

She stood before the huge, iron gate and took a deep breath. the red brick dust she inhaled made her cough. Her eyes watered so she wiped them with her sleeves. _Good,_ she thought, blinking back tears, _that is good. It means you are alive. Remember that feeling when you are on the other side._  
Then, she stepped into the chaos.

Astapor was in ruins. had it been dirty before, it was soaked with filth now, stinking worse than any pigsty. _What do you expect of an open grave?_ She’d been prepared for the smells but still they hit her in the gut and almost made her throw up. In the burning heat, the corpses of her people had been rotting now for weeks. The dead littered the streets and choked the river. Starvation and the bloody flux had taken one half, quarrels and fights the other. _I have been ruling a city of Dead People._

The first man to come at her was a crude Summer Islander, clad in copper scales and rags, a sellsword of the Windblown. The man was a good three heads taller than her but he died all the same. She stepped aside when he charged, swiftly slicing his unprotected arm with a knife and stabbing him in the side with her shortsword when he turned around to face her.   
As soon he had fallen dead to her feet, though, five more soldiers appeared at the other end of the Plaza, and her world grew small, until it was reduced to hacking and slicing and ducking below blows, an endless, repetitive mantra of pain and heat and blood where time did not matter.   
  
Finally, Queen Whore found herself on the ground, her mouth full of red dry dust and wet, red blood. Her shortsword was gone and when she grabbed for her dagger, her fingers couldn’t find it. towering over her stood a giant of a man, a Westerosi by the look of him, but it did not matter. When he swung his axe over his head to bring it down in a blow that would have cut her in half, she flung herself around, reaching for a red brick to her left, grabbing it, holding it. Since the axblow had not found its target, the sellsword had lost his balance, struggeling to gain it again as she got up.   
The jagged red brick crashed through helmet and bone to shatter the man’s skull, killing him instantly. 

The false Queen looked at the rock in astonishment. She turned around just in time to see a barrel-bellied Yunkai’i storming towards her, steel flashing in his hand. A brick may not be a sword but it was all she had and it was better than nothing. She started to run, screaming, cursing the man in every language she knew, jumping aside just before she was in swordreach and bringing the brick down to the man’s head, roaring.   
The Stone found home, but as it struck the sellsword, she heared something clatter behind her and knew she had made a grave mistake. She flung around cursing, to face the oncoming rival, but he was already onto her, so close she could smell his bad breath through all the stench of Astapor. 

The next thing she knew, she was lying on the ground again, a soaring pain in her chest, cold and hot at the same time. As she lay there, drowning in her own blood and darkness started to close in around her, she could not form a straight thought. All she felt and all she knew was pain and hatred.  With her last breath, she cursed them all, the Silver Queen who’d abandoned her, the Great Masters who’d enslaved her, the Free Companies who’d killed her. Them, and the stinking rathole she had been Queen of. 


End file.
